cry harder mommy’s watching
We always wanted to be actresses. Red carpet. Applause. Recognition. Instead, we scrubbed luxury apartments for a Berlin start-up called Book a Tiger and cleaned the toilets of rich people just to get by.
Glamorous? Not exactly. Was this supposed to be our “prime”? One day, while cleaning a director’s loft, Marina joked: What if we blackmailed him into giving us acting jobs? Of course, we didn’t do it – but the question stuck: What if we stopped waiting and just gave ourselves a chance? Because the truth was, we were at rock bottom. Burned out, depressed, and full of rage we hid behind drugs, eating disorders, self-hatred, and a generous serving of mommy issues. Out of the need to talk about that time, we created our coming-of-age film: DRAMAQUEEN, our dramedy about a woman who dares to do what we never could: create her own chance in a broken system – even if she has to break the rules to get it.
Set against the backdrop of Berlin’s film scene, the story follows Rosa, a Latina cleaner who fights to get her big breakthrough in a film. Caught between a distant ex-girlfriend, a clingy neighbor who just divorced her husband, and a female *director on the verge of a mental breakdown, she is haunted by the absence of the one woman whose love she never knew: her mother.
DRAMAQUEEN is a funny baroque telenovela-type of film about mommy issues, rage, and characters who are strong, loud, contradictory, and unforgettable.
Marina & Paula, Berlin Schöneberg, 2025
